WikiPediaMan, or the rise of the new pseudo-intellectual pedant

“I distrust the man of a single book”
– attributed to Thomas Aquinas

Forgive me if I quote the author of Tom Sawyer from memory, but it’s good to exercise your memory, to hold on to old phrases and quotes read in good books. Something that is being lost.

A while ago someone argued against me using the WikiPedia as a source. It isn’t the first time it has happened; last year, when we were discussing the ULPN project, the Spanish Wikipedia’s definition of computer was used to suggest that what was actually being built was a device.

It worries me that many people don’t understand that Wikipedia is a work in progress, that it can be full of inaccuracies, and that only a percentage of its articles are correct.

Using Wikipedia in an article, or to back up an argument, is fine, but you have to verify that the content is valid.

You also have to consider that Wikipedia articles are the result of a consensus. In some areas of knowledge, that consensus is no guarantee of validity. You also have to consider that some points of view may not be represented.
It also happens that there are articles written by people who are no experts on the subject.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Wikipedia, and I consider it a valuable source of knowledge, but you need judgment to use it.

But I want to tell you about the origin of a new kind of intellectual pedant. I call him WikiPediaMan.

Decline

Mickey Rourke says his decline in the 90s began when he shot that awful movie Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man (the truth is that if it weren’t for Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez, he’d still be lost to us).

I believe the rise of WikiPediaMan is the beginning of the decline of the intellect. By WikiPediaMan I mean a new kind of pedant. A pedant who lives in forums, chats, mailing lists. Who also has blogs. But if you talked with him in the real world, at a dinner, at a social gathering, you could probably take him apart easily. Without internet access, WikiPediaMan is nothing.

There are many advantages to having read a lot, to understanding phenomena at a macro level, and not getting stuck on the minutiae, or the details you can find with a search on Wikipedia, or on Google.

If it’s not on Google, it doesn’t exist

There are people who use Google as a source of information, and rest their arguments on whether or not they can find information about it on Google. If it’s not on Google then it doesn’t exist.

What is going on?

Google, with all its capacity, covers only a fraction of all the information on the Internet. Lately they are digitizing the works written in books. But even so, they won’t be able to cover all of human knowledge. Neither can we, as individuals.

The end of written language

I may be wrong. There is no better way to look like a fool than trying to predict the future. But I have my suspicions that a day will come when people stop reading.

In a science fiction novel I read recently, the author tells us about the humans of the future, who have lost the ability to read. They live in a hyper-technological society, with robotic servants, living in idleness. If something happens to them they are transported to the “firmary”, where they are reconstituted.

They have no need to read. The only amusement left over from the old world is the Burning Man festival, a countercultural festival for us, in the future a decadent party that serves as an excuse to get drunk and have sex.

Violence is not part of their lives, except through a drama they watch by means of a cloth they place over their eyes. Everything is visual, there is no need to read, and one of the novel’s heroes stands out for his ability to read, a lost secret, a function that is no longer available.

I believe that in the future people won’t read. Because they’ll have access to unlimited video, and if a picture is worth a thousand written words, then you can do the math. Today’s young people struggle to read, they don’t like it.

If we had computers with speech recognition, keyboards wouldn’t be necessary. Nor would the computer need to show us its answers as a bunch of letters on a screen. Why read if it can show us a simulation, or a video with the result of any question we put to it.

Do we need to know how to read and write?

The truth is I don’t know whether we need to know how to read or write. Maybe a culture based on video and spoken interaction with computers would achieve greater advances.
But maybe not. Maybe it would limit our growth.

What I do know is that search engines, and access to so much information, are making a lot of people believe they are cultured, that they know more than their elders, that they don’t need more education.

These new intellectual pedants are dangerous, because they are monkeys with razors, monkeys who take fragments worked out by others, without questioning, without digesting, without analyzing.

If there are journalists capable of believing that a man is pregnant, and journalists are supposed to be people trained to analyze information, what can we expect from the common man, the one who isn’t very bright?